CELGA 1 (Galician A2) common mistakes
CELGA 1 (Galician A2) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Using Spanish forms and structures as a default when speaking or writing, e.g. saying "el/a" for the Galician article, writing "tamén" but pronouncing it as Spanish "también", or forming the perfect with "he falado" instead of "falei".
Galician and Spanish are closely related and most candidates come from a Spanish-speaking environment, so automatic transfer produces interference: shared vocabulary and syntax make the Spanish form feel correct, and the differences (article system, verb tenses, lexicon) are precisely the ones not noticed.
What to do instead
Keep a contrastive error log with three columns: Spanish form, Galician form, context. Review it before each practice task. Do targeted drills on the highest-frequency contrasts: articles o/a/os/as, the perfect tense (falei/teño falado distribution), and Galician-specific vocabulary (cociña, xanela, can, falar). Read short Galician texts aloud daily so the correct forms become the automatic default.
Confusing the two demonstrative series and the two possessive series, e.g. mixing "este/esta" with "aquel/aquela" or using "meu" where the context requires "o meu", and choosing the wrong demonstrative for proximity in a dialogue.
Galician has three demonstrative degrees and possessives that usually take the article (o meu can), while Spanish habits and simplified textbook tables lead candidates to collapse the distinctions or drop the article before possessives.
What to do instead
Build a table of demonstratives (este/ese/aquel with their feminine and neuter forms) and possessives (meu/teu/seu/noso/voso/seu, with article). Practise with concrete spatial prompts: point to objects near you, near the listener, and far away, saying the full phrase. Write five sentences about your own belongings using the article plus possessive, and check each one against the table.
Reading or listening for every word and freezing on unknown vocabulary, so the candidate misses the main idea and answers detail questions from a single half-understood word.
A2 candidates have limited vocabulary and often treat unknown words as failures rather than as background noise; exam tasks reward global comprehension and specific information, not full decoding.
What to do instead
Train a top-down routine: before reading or listening, identify the text type and what information the task needs. Then read or listen once for the gist, answer the global question, and only then scan for the specific detail. Practise with short authentic texts (notices, menus, messages) and deliberately skip unknown words, noting only whether they are needed for the answer.
Answering a functional task with grammatically correct but pragmatically wrong language, e.g. replying to an invitation with a bare "non" or using "ti" in a formal shop or doctor context.
Candidates study grammar and vocabulary in isolation and rarely practise the communicative function (inviting, apologising, requesting, refusing politely) with its register and formulaic phrases, so they translate the intention directly from Spanish or English.
What to do instead
Learn functions as fixed chunks: for each function (invitar, aceptar, rexeitar, pedir, desculparse, suxerir) memorise two or three full formulae, one informal and one formal (e.g. "Gustaríame... pero non podo", "Vai vir á festa?"). Role-play short dialogues with a partner or record yourself, then check that the register (ti/vostede) matches the situation.
Writing a message or short text with no greeting, no closing, and no connectors, producing a list of disconnected sentences that does not fulfil the task's communicative purpose.
Under time pressure candidates focus on producing correct sentences and forget that the task is a message, an email or a note, which has a conventional structure and requires linking ideas.
What to do instead
Use a fixed template: greeting (Ola, / Estimado señor:), opening line stating purpose, two or three body sentences linked with basic connectors (mais, porque, tamén, despois, por iso), closing formula (Un saúdo, / Ata pronto). Practise writing the same message in eight to ten minutes and self-check against a short checklist: greeting, purpose, all required points, closing, connectors.
Misplacing written accents and confusing homographs, e.g. writing "e" for "é", "a" for "á", "mas" for "mais", or omitting the diacritic in "cómpre", "pólo", "dá", and in interrogatives (que/qué, como/como).
Galician accentuation rules overlap with Spanish but the diacritic set differs, and short function words are easily overlooked because they seem unimportant; candidates also confuse words that differ only by an accent.
What to do instead
Memorise the small closed list of diacritic pairs (é/e, á/a, ó/o, dá/da, cómpre/compra-type cases, máis/mas, só/so) and test yourself with minimal-pair sentences. When writing, do a dedicated final pass checking only accents and apostrophes, separate from grammar checking. Keep a personal list of the ten accents you miss most and review it weekly.
Producing the wrong verb form under pressure: using the infinitive or third person for first person, mixing irregular preterites (fun, estiven, tiven, fixen, vin), or using the wrong tense for a past narrative.
A2 candidates know the paradigms receptively but have not automated retrieval, and irregular preterites are memorised as lists without production practice, so accuracy collapses when attention is on the message.
What to do instead
Automate the highest-frequency irregulars through oral pattern drills: say the six persons of facer, ir, estar, ter, ver, vir aloud daily for two weeks. Then use them in short controlled production tasks (five sentences about yesterday, a four-line note about last weekend). In narratives, decide the tense before writing: preterite for completed events, imperfect for description.
Ignoring the sociocultural context of a text: not recognising the difference between a formal institutional notice and a personal message, or misreading a text about a local festival, timetable or administrative habit because local conventions are unknown.
Candidates prepare language forms but not the cultural frames that give texts their meaning, so they interpret Galician-specific references (festas, horarios, local institutions, gastronomy) through their own cultural assumptions.
What to do instead
Study a short list of recurring sociocultural topics: main festivities and their timing, meal and shop hours, typical foods and products, administrative documents and their tone, and forms of address. For each, read one short authentic-style text and note both the facts and the register. In exam tasks, first classify the text by sender, recipient and purpose before answering.
Treating Galician as a single uniform variety and being thrown by dialectal forms or by texts that mix registers, e.g. not recognising a western or eastern variant, or rejecting a correct answer because it does not match the textbook form.
Courses usually teach one standard, and candidates assume anything different is an error; exposure to real variation is minimal, so variant forms look wrong rather than acceptable.
What to do instead
Learn the standard forms as the production target, then build a recognition list of common variant features (e.g. different verb endings, article and pronoun forms, lexicon) with the note "recognise, do not necessarily produce". Read or listen to short samples from different areas and match variant forms to their standard equivalents.
Mismanaging the exam itself: spending too long on one reading item, leaving the writing task until the last minutes, or not reading the task instructions to see how many points or lines are required.
Candidates rehearse content but not timing, and anxiety makes them over-invest in difficult items while underestimating the time needed to plan and check a written production.
What to do instead
Rehearse under timed conditions with the real section structure: set a per-item time limit, skip and return to hard items, and reserve a fixed block (e.g. ten minutes) for planning and checking the writing. Before answering, underline the instruction words (cantas palabras, que información, formal ou informal) and tick each requirement off after drafting.